(Businessweek) — It may seem unthinkable that a company with so formidable a public image and financial track record as BP (BP) is fighting to save its reputation—and potentially, its very existence—less than two years after the oil industry logged its biggest-ever growth in profits. Reversals of fortune of this magnitude aren’t as rare as we sometimes think. Recall how the tobacco giants wound up ceding enormous, profit-generating power to the U.S. government and how asbestos lawsuits forced such major industrial outfits as Johns-Manville into bankruptcy.
